How to Make a Mermaid 
Adrian Woolfson
- Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe by Simon Conway Morris
In a letter in the Times on 8 September 1809, W.M. Munro, a schoolmaster, described seeing a mermaid off the coast of Caithness. Walking along the shore of Sandside Bay, his attention was ‘arrested by the appearance of a figure resembling an unclothed human female, sitting upon a rock extending into the sea, and apparently in the action of combing its hair, which flowed around its shoulders’, and was ‘of a light brown colour’. ‘The head was shaded on the crown, the forehead round, the face plump, the cheeks ruddy, the eyes blue, the mouth and lips of a natural form, resembling those of a man.’ ‘The breasts and abdomen, the arms and fingers were of the size of a full-grown body of the human species.’
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
Adrian Woolfson is the author of the The Intelligent Person’s Guide to Genetics and Life without Genes: The History and Future of Genomes. He teaches medicine at Clare College, Cambridge.
Other articles by this contributor:
So much for genes · The Century of the Gene by Evelyn Fox Keller
print layout
tell a friend